Genealogy Story – Building a Tree out of Twigs

Although I have been interested in genealogy for a long time it was not something that I had done much research on, especially the process of constructing a family tree. That changed in a big way about 8 years ago.

When my father-in-law passed away in 2006, we thought it would be good to take some of my mother-in-law’s inheritance and finally complete the house that they had been living in for 35 years. We put up a pole barn behind the house and moved the house contents into it while the construction was going on. Then in the fall of 2008, my mother-in-law fell several times and ended up in the hospital so my wife and I decided that it would be a proper decision for her to temporarily move to Michigan and help oversee her mother’s caregiving. That meant that I would be home in PA without her for an extended period.

When I dropped my wife off, I noticed that in the pole barn there were several (perhaps 7 or 8) large boxes (the size of banana boxes) of “genealogy” material. So I thought that something that I could do for my mother-in-law would be to organize them. I packed them in the back of our van and brought them back to PA. But when I started going through them a few days later I realized that this was not going to be a simple task.

The boxes were crammed full of small pieces of paper and letters. Evidently her take on “genealogy” was to simply save everything related to that topic. If one of her relatives sent her a letter that had in it something like “my daughter Olivia’s 16^th birthday is tomorrow,” she would circle that phrase, mark the envelope as “genealogy” and toss it in the box. If she received an announcement of a high school graduation, she would save those as well. And if someone told her something, then she would record it on a scrap of paper and save it (she did not believe in using full sheets of paper, so this would be something like the back of an envelope). If someone asked her about some genealogy item, she would write it out (again on a scrap of paper), but would also use carbon paper to make copies of it. She would send the original to the person and keep all the carbon copies.

So, how was I to make sense of all of this? I decided to use my computer to help. In the above example about Olivia, I would type in:

            Jean Smith [Getting the name from the bottom of the letter]

                 Olivia Smith (2/3/1954) [basing the date on the date of the letter and the “16^th”]

Then I would throw the letter into a discard pile (unless it was a historic document like an obituary). So instead of a full letter and envelope, I would have just two lines in an ever-growing computer document.

After a couple of weeks doing this, I had a large discard pile, a much smaller “keep” pile, and a LOOONG computer document of twigs (relationships such as Jean being the mother of Olivia) and facts (primarily dates, but other interesting things as well). Now I just had to make sense of all of it.

Fortunately, the cut/paste function of the computer is a pretty powerful tool for doing this. I started another series of documents, one for my wife’s grandparents on her mother’s side, one for her grandparents on her father’s side, and a few others for great-grandparents, etc. I would scan the base document and when I saw something that fit into one of these other documents, I would cut it out and paste it into the spot where it belonged – slowly connecting twigs to other twigs and building up the branches of the descendant trees in the final documents.

I won’t lie – this was a pretty daunting task, one that took several months. But slowly emerging from the long list of twigs and facts, a series of descendant trees took shape. To give you an idea of scale, in the end I had 11 documents totaling 40 pages of single-spaced descendant trees.

But I also had a couple of pages of “facts” that did not seem to connect. Fortunately, my mother-in-law was still living, so I could ask her about them. For the most part they were items that ended up getting discarded. Some were graduation cards from children that she had baby-sat for over the years. Some were things like the wife of their landlord who had been given the honorary title of “aunt” even though she was not related at all. But a few I was able to find “homes” for in the trees once I knew the rest of the story.

My mother-in-law passed away in early 2010. But by then I had reduced the huge pile of “twigs” and “facts” that she had accumulated into a manageable set of computer documents.

This is the raw material of genealogy research. Trying to make sense out of a bunch of disconnected items so that you can “tell the story” of a person. And as I eventually connected this detailed work with my ancestry.com membership and researched back through the generations, I was able to see the smile on my mother-in-law’s face when I could tell her about her ancestors that came over on the Mayflower!

And my work has had other benefits as well. I was recently contacted by someone who had found a picture of “Lucile Bartlette” and wanted to give it to her family. By going into my descendant trees, I had the name of a living grandson who I then contacted. So he will now have a picture of his grandmother from the early 1900s.